


faithful appetite

by ludling



Series: a long dark table set for two [2]
Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, dunk me in the garbage, honestly i am trash for these two, lord save us all, str8 2 hell in like real cute outfits, there's a magic dick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-26
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2019-08-26 15:52:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16684567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ludling/pseuds/ludling
Summary: Hilda has never had to work for an ex-boyfriend, never dealt with a Zelda whose emotions she didn't understand more intimately than her own, and has definitely never eaten a whole goat heart.There's a first time for everything she supposes.(continuation of previous fic unholy delights so read that one first if any of this shit's gonna make sense)





	1. one

Sabrina's really put her foot in it this time.

Hilda loves her, she loves the dear girl so much that it frightens her, but she sometimes catches herself wondering when this rebellious chapter will finally come to a close. Summoning a couple of Shamayw, of all ancient demons, to right a petty schoolyard squabble. "But you don't get it aunties- they were trying to sacrifice her-" Is all their indignant charge will squeak once they've cleaned up her mess, and returned home close to dawn. 

"Bed" Is all Zelda will say " _Now._ "

She's eyeing the kitchen, more specifically a bottle of strong whiskey Hilda knows she's thinks she's got hidden behind the cans of pureed pumpkin and soup in the cupboard next to the sink. She's still a little pale around the gills. Make-up has hidden a lot, but Hilda can see through her sister's practiced hand. During the fight, her binding spell had a little wobble running right through its center, that Hilda caught and righted before their niece noticed anything.

Sabrina shrinks into herself at the tone. Hilda waits till Zelda has set off for the dark kitchen doorway, eases out of her shoes and hangs up her coat slowly, before she follows the girl upstairs.

"Oh love" She sighs as she cracks open the door just a bit. 

Sabrina is sitting on her unmade bed in her pjamas, stroking Salem and looking like she's trying very hard not to cry. She doesn't look up at Hilda's words.

Hilda makes her way over and sits next to her niece. She brushes an dirty strand of white hair back from her face. Sabrina leans into her side, and Hilda lets her arm come around the girl. She doesn't cry, and that's new. It makes Hilda proud and oddly sad. She's growing up, however slowly and painfully for all involved.

"Let's get you to bed"

Sabrina nods against her side, and Hilda gets up. She makes Sabrina stand for a moment, fluffing the pillows, retucking the fitted sheet and straightening the comforter. Salem jumps out of her way but doesn't leave the bed. They all need a good wash: sheets, familiar and teenage witch. She can only imagine the state Zelda had let them all live in when she was gone. It's a wonder they're all still alive honestly. _Well_ , she thinks darkly, _there was a moment where it could have gone either way._

Hilda makes a point of tucking the blanket extra tight around Sabrina tonight. She knows Zelda hates this too. _'She's the only daughter of the foremost warlock of our generation sister, and a promising witch in her own right. I cannot fathom why you continue to infantilise her'_ Zelda had said around Sabrina's fourteenth birthday. Hilda has every intention of doing this until the girl is High Priestess if that's what she wants. Zelda be damned.

"Snug as a bug in a rug" She says, finishing up and patting the blanketed ridge of Sabrina's shin. Salem has resettled on the pillow next to her face. Sabrina's hand curls into his soft belly and he begins to purr quietly. 

"With a tiny mug that says number one bug" Sabrina sing-songs back to her, looking for a moment like the little girl she seems to have been just yesterday. Hilda pats her leg again, feeling tears well up for no reason at all. A little line appears between Sabrina's eyebrows. Hilda would ask what her hedgehog frown is doing here after they've saved the day, but she resists.

"Does this mean you're back?"

Hilda thinks of pushing Zelda up against the hallway mirror, of kissing her sharp mouth, and of shoving her fingers into so much warmth. She feels her face get hot even though there's no possible way Sabrina could know about any of the sordid images marching through her head-

"Yes, she is"

Hilda turns. Zelda leans against Sabrina's doorframe, arms folded, and wearing a black robe that reaches all the way to her neck. Her expression is closed off. She sounds very tired.

"How long have you been there?"

Zelda enters, ignoring her sister’s question, and gracefully perches on the other side of Sabrina's bed. Hilda hopes she can only see the outline of the bandages on her back because she's looking for them. Zelda strokes Sabrina's cheek. It's a rare gesture of affection and Hilda sees Sabrina blink in sleepy surprise. Zelda tucks a white tendril behind Sabrina's ear. "Your hair needs a wash"

Sabrina smiles, and Zelda matches it, uneasily but immediatley. It pierces something deep in Hilda's being, the two of them in the low light, so very similar and so very different.

"I'll do it tomorrow Auntie Zee"

Zelda nods, lowers her hand and Hilda and her both rise. They both look back, just as Sabrina reaches for the lightswitch, her tired face briefly highlighted by the glow. "Goodnight aunties" She says, then with a _click_ , the room is dark. Zelda closes the door softly.

Then it’s just the two of them in the corridor. 

The air feels very thick suddenly. Hilda's mouth is full of too much saliva, but she doesn't want to swallow while Zelda is looking at her, dark and still unreadable. She remembers very vividly suddenly the sound her fingers had made when she'd driven them into Zelda, half mad and so turned on she thought her head would blow straight off. A wet sound. _Sloppy_. Words she'd never associated with her sister. 

Zelda's still looking at her. Hilda knows she has nothing to fear, hasn't made any blunders worthy of the Cain pit in days, so why should the hairs on the back of her neck rise, why should a shiver keep threatening to cross her shoulderblades?

"Let's go to bed" Zelda's voice is low, and for a moment Hilda entertains the thought of walking in the other direction from her sister, of heading to the spare bedroom and facing her ire later. But Zelda has already turned, and Hilda is mesmerised by the sway of her hips, the shimmering wave of her rose gold hair. The darkness of the hallway swallows her up a second later. She'd always been so damn beautiful, and Hilda's always watched her from afar. And she's frightened sure. Zelda has frightened her since they reached puberty, but never in the way she'd intended. Hilda lists towards her new room a second longer, then squares her shoulders and follows.

When she opens the door to their room, resisting the ridiculous urge to knock, Zelda is in the process of tugging her arm free from one strap of her nightgown, and then the other. Her robe lies discarded on the bed. Hilda can finally see the reason for the high collar. A bruise marrs the smooth collum of Zelda's neck. Hilda remembers sucking the skin there. She can even see the teeth marks. _I put those there._ A new wave of desire washes over her. She licks her lips, trying desperatley to ignore the throb low in her belly. Zelda's eyes darken.

Hilda swallows and says as loudly and as cheerfully as she can "Let's have a look at those bandages then"

Zelda only nods at this and turns, peeling her nightgown down as she does. Tucks her hair out of the way. Hilda is glad. Zelda's breasts are something she could not stop touching. Couldn't stop pinching and licking, and just palming in her hand, marvelling at the softness, the warmth, the way her fair skin turned splotchy wherever Hilda kissed.

The bandages are better. They're a sobering sight in fact. Hilda had kept checking on the wounds before Sabrina had interrupted them. Surely all their rolling and grinding and sweat was ripping open all the cuts. She'd tried to be sneaky about it, running her hands gently along the bandages while they kissed, feeling for any seepage, but finally Zelda had pulled away and snapped _'They're as good as healed. Stop. Worrying.'_ before swiftly descending and stoppering Hilda's protests with her lips.

She was lying, Hilda sees now. Two of the bigger welts have reopened, and a third one looks like it's about to. She weaves her spell over them. Under Hilda's healing magic, the small cut strengthens and the other two stop bleeding. Zelda shivers. In spite of herself, Hilda lowers her right hand, letting it hover just above the damage on Zelda's nape. She's hot here. Practically glowing with it.  _She's hot everywhere_ , Hilda thinks quickly removing her hand, _and haven't I discovered it again and again these past twenty-four hours?_

The salve she's made up is on Zelda's nightstand. She reaches for it, and dips two fingers in, rubbing the ointment between her hands to warm it up. Zelda shifts again when she touches her but says nothing, her face still turned away from her sister. Hilda tries to keep her touches light. Clinical even. She applies new bandages, pressing down the edges twice just to be sure.

Zelda is right. In another few days she'll be fine again. Probably won't even scar. Witches heal fast.

But they are not immortal.

Zelda's freshly mangled back springs to her minds eye again. Hilda's spent a lot of the past three days cleaning in an effort to push that single terrifying image away. Zelda, the counter point of her existance, the pillar around which her life had rotated for centuries now, bloodied and so weak she'd been unable to access her own magic.

 _If Ambrose hadn't found her, another day and night she might not have_ \- but Hilda stops herself here. She actually imagines an old fashioned train, just like the ones Father used to take them on, that she halts right on the tracks. Just pulls a lever and diverts to another route. Like how is she going to change into her nightdress. They've got an ensuite, but neither sister has ever been particularly shy around each other. Would it be strange to start now? 

In the end she decides to go and brush her teeth, conventiently taking her night things with her. Zelda remains on the bed, slip of a nightdress pulled down around her waist, nearly asleep for all intents and purposes. When Hilda's closed the bathroom door the tub suddenly looks terribly appealing. It's four in the morning, but she hasn't had a bath since she moved into that dingy apartment, and she feels more on edge then when they were facing Sabrina's Old Egyptian demons.

She runs the bath to only a quarter full but very hot. It burns her feet when she steps in. She slides backwards until she's flat on her back. The scratches on her upper arms sting faintly, but Hilda has the distinct impression that Zelda was holding back. Her breasts and tummy form three islands. The red nailpolish on her toes could do with a touch-up. There's a mark purpling on her left breast that she doesn't remember receiving. She submerges her face. It feels nice. 

She brushes her teeth carefully, flosses, and applies her night cream very evenly. She cuts her nails, making a mental note to burn them tomorrow, putting them in the jar that they keep at the sink for just that purpose. She picks out the hairs in her brush and puts them in there too. _All parts of a witch have power_ , their mother had always said. It was tedious, but better than being hit with an extremly effective hex because you were sloppy.

She expects Zelda to be asleep when she softly closes the bathroom door five minutes later. It's been a long day and whatever she says, Zelda's wounds are still draining her.

She does not expect Zelda to be draped across her bed, head propped up on her hand, watching Hilda with what would best be described as hunger.

"You certainly took your time" She drawls.

Hilda feels her face flush. Her hands have started to get clammy despite the warmth still flooding out of the bathroom. She folds her clothes and puts them back into her open suitcase. Zelda's eyes track her.

Hilda straightens again, wishing she had a robe of her own, anything but this unshapely nightgown. "I was dirty" She answers, then swallows, thinking of how that must have sounded to Zelda, offensive or maybe even _inappropriate_ -

" _Come here_ "

If Zelda didn't lift her arms, and shift ever so slightly to the far side of her bed, Hilda would have thought she'd imagined it. "I'm not going to _bite_ Hilda." Zelda says, rolling her eyes, arms still stretched loosely towards her. Surely Hilda is imagining the neediness and slight whine in Zelda's tone. There's a flush travelling all the way from her throat to where the satin vees over her cleavage. Hilda _comes here_ , almost stumbling over her own feet in the process, heart beating hard now.

Zelda's arms fold around her, and Hilda feels her lips find her neck. Feels Zelda's tongue lick a generous stripe to her jaw. She shivers, then pulls back and, unable to help herself, darts a kiss on Zelda's lips. She tucks her face into her sisters neck again very quickly. Zelda smells most like herself here. Like expensive cosmetics and cigarette smoke and the sour hint of sweat.

Hilda presses her eyes shut. Zelda must feel her heart hammering away in her chest. If she does, she doesn't mention it. Instead Hilda hears the sound of Zelda exhaling, as if she's just passed some great test. Feels Zelda reach over her and turn off the light.

They are both still for a moment.

"I'm going to have to give up that baby aren't I?"

Hilda relaxes in Zelda's arms. This she knows. This is within the bounds of what they used to be to each other. She's also relieved beyond words not to have to be the one to bring this up. Faustus Blackwood is far too regular a visitor at their house. The whole baby business was so _reckless_ and unlike Zelda - almost like she was grasping at straws, reaching for a family when she had one assembled all around her-

"We can sort it out in tomorrow" Hilda mumbles, exhaling a relieved breath of her own against the warm skin of Zelda's throat "It will all be better then."

 

***

 

Hilda wakes and knows instantly that she hasn't slept very long.

Zelda is draped half across her, an arm flung out possessively over her stomach. Hilda stares at her sisters face for a long moment. It doesn't take much effort to wriggle out of her hold. It's still pitch black, but when Hilda squints at her wristwatch on the bed side table, it's already well past seven. _Bloody winter_.

She checks on Sabrina, still asleep in her nest of blankets, then pads down to the kitchen to begin their semi-special occassion breakfast. Sabrina will take the day off school, mortal and profane, she decides, no matter what Zelda has to say on the matter. It's been far too long since they've had a girls day, a day of nothing but good food and laughter and maybe even a board game or two. She sends Mercer, her most adventerous spider, off to the Academy of Unseen Arts to tell them Sabrina is unwell.

It's still dark out when Hilda ties her apron around her waist. She cracks eggs into a bowl. She mixes in milk and flour and sugar and just a dash of custard powder. She makes a note that they're nearly out of maple syrup. She puts out the condiments (Zelda likes her pancakes thin and dusted with icing sugar and a squeeze of lemon, Sabrina likes hers smothered in cinnamon and sugar or dripping in Hilda's homemade jam, Ambrose and Hilda are maple syrup converts) and sets out mismatched plates. The tea kettle sits on the burner to her left. She lights the candles with a smart click of her fingers. The record player by the window hums to life with another click.

When Sabrina enters the kitchen, she's just sliding the first pancake on to a plate. "No school today lamb" She says, giving the girl a wink. While Sabrina doesn't exactly leap for joy, she does smile weakly, chooses a jar of last years currant jam and takes the plate from Hilda's hand. She spreads the mixture thoughtfully, frowning a little all the while. Hilda keeps frying pancakes, and waits.

"Auntie" Sabrina finally begins, rolling her pancake crepe style, and slicing a section off "How would you tell someone you don't like them, you know, like _that_?"

She's glad to be facing the stove still. It gives her time to roll her eyes heaven-wards. Why did Sabrina have to be so much like Zelda? Admirers everywhere they went, the two of them. Hilda had at most two or three persistent boys during her school years, and she still has a dark suspicion that Edward had a hand in that. 

"Just be kind love" She says turning the pancake with a practiced flick of her wrist "Don't hurt their feelings more than you have to, but be firm. You don't owe yourself to anybody."

She turns and slides the pancake on to the growing stack. "Who's this person who likes you anyway?" She asks, hoping she's hit the right balance between protective and conspiratorial.

"Nicholas Scratch" Sabrina groans, jamming another big forkfull of pancake into her mouth.

Hilda smiles. _There_. Now, how to delicately handle what could obviously be another Harvey Kinkle situation in the making-

"Scratch?" 

Zelda, morning paper already clamped under her arm, frowns at their niece. "I do hope you'll reconsider Sabrina" Her eyes alight on the food next to Hilda. She drops her newspaper and takes her plate. "They are one of the foremost families on the eastern seaboard" She picks a pancake off the stack with a fork, and bumps Hilda's hip with her own. Hilda nearly drops the frying pan. "Not like the Spellmans of course, but you could do worse."

She turns to Hilda. "You sent a spider I presume?"

Hilda nods. "Mercer" She chokes out.

"Good, I'll call that dreary mortal school after breakfast" Zelda eyes her a little longer. Hilda stares at the batter bubbling in the pan harder than she's ever stared at an unhealthy breakfast food in her life.

"I just don't want to start anything with anybody after Harvey" Sabrina says gloomily. Now Hilda meets Zelda's eye. They come to an agreement in under a second. Zelda will take point on this one. Raising a child will give you telepathy like that, Hilda supposes.

"Wonderful, then you can focus on schoolwork " Zelda says and sits down next to the girl, reaching for her newspaper "That will be a nice change."

Sabrina snorts. Hilda relaxes. It's not like either of them really know what to say when the subject of Harvey comes up. Hilda knows for a fact Cerberus isn't, _wasn't_ , the same. He'd been a distraction. He wasn't what Harvey is to her niece. She chances another glance at her sister. She's dissappeared behind a newspaper. A thin cloud of cigarrete smoke drifts over the pages.

The kettle starts to whistle, and Hilda busies herself with pouring cups of tea for all of them. 

 

***

 

It's a nice morning. Almost like the ones they used to have when Sabrina was very little and first started showing signs of magic.

After breakfast they all feel a little overstuffed, and decide a walk through the woods is in order, and end up down at the river. Sabrina has a charming idea for a water-based protection spell for the house, some variation of a Sumerian blessing. Zelda supervises from a rock, holding the baby liberated from Ambrose's room, while Hilda gets to muck around in the ice and mud assisting as their niece tries, and fails to recall the correct pronounciation for the charm.

She does get two hag stones out of the expedition. She decides she'll keep one and give one to Ambrose. They're excellent for seeing to the truth of things. If the truth isn't surrounded by too many heavy enchantments. Zelda scoffs at the rocks and mutters _'old wives tales'_ under her breath, but Hilda is content.

Ambrose is finally awake when they return to the house. He pockets the stone with a smile. He listens to the night's adventures while eating pancakes that Hilda warms up in the oven. He groans at all the right moments. Sabrina still looks a little put out by it all, but Hilda can see the beginnings of a smile at some points of their retelling. Zelda excuses herself mid-way through the story to ' _check on the baby_ '. Both of her charges look at her a little nervously.

"It's alright children" Hilda says willing herself to believe it "She's just tired. Long day."

Sabrina seems mollified by that, but Ambrose still frowns at her.

"Alright" She says " I'll go check on her."

Zelda is due for a bandage change anyway, but Hilda has been... _hesistant_ to come near her. She knows she's part of the same game Edward and Zelda played now. The one she caught them at so many decades ago. But it doesn't feel safe. It feels terrifying. Like she could lose a sister while playing.

"Zelds?" She calls, cracking the door open to their room just an inch. 

Zelda doesn't reply. She's bent over the bassinet, eyeing the sleeping child. On her bed, just sitting on the coverlet, is a cat o' nine tails.

Hilda nearly rips the door off its hinges with the force of her anger. "What in Lucifer's name do you think you're doing?" She stalks over to the bed and grabs the leather. It feels unnaturally warm in her hands. It feels _evil_. Just the way those annoying Born Again sects always talked about.

Zelda looks up at her, frowing, and now Hilda sees she holds the jar from the bathroom. "I thought I could do the honors today" She opens the lid and drops something invisible to Hilda's eyes in there. "I combed her hair" Her eyes find the baby again. Something in her whole posture softens "I think there's a couple in Maine who'd be just the thing for her."

Hilda will not let herself be that easily cajoled. "And what about this?" She holds the whip. Her hand is hurting from how tightly she's holding it. She can't seem to get her grip to relax.

"I thought I might burn it too" Zelda tilts her head. "Unless you'd like to?"

Hilda can only stare at her. 

"Yes" She says after a moment. She'll have to get the axe out too. She wants it wrecked. Her hands are itching to try to tear it apart here and now.

A strange half smile plays around Zelda's mouth. She tightens the lid of the jar. Her dress is of deep magenta today. Hilda can see the outline of her corset. Zelda takes a step towards her "Hilda-"

"I'll get the fire started" Hilda swallows thickly "And get the children out of the way"

She stumbles to the door, not fast enough to miss Zelda's frown.

 

***

 

Sabrina has disappeared back into her room and Ambrose seems to have plans involving his boyfriend and his new car, so there's actually no charges to manouver.

She kindles a fire in the living room, then heads out to the woodshed. The vegetable garden needs looking at. Technically it belongs to both of them, a fiction which Hilda delicately upholds, when in truth it's hers. Zelda has no talent for plants, though she has the better instinct for drawing power out of them. Nurture was always Hilda's forte. She'll have to get the beds ready for spring soon.

The first swing of the axe feels good. It splits the leather handle clean in half. Some of the intricate weaving bursts undone. The second swing feels better. She has to use her skirt to carry all the bits in the end. She's not sorry.

Zelda is kneeling in front of the fireplace. She's stoked Hilda's weak flames into a strong, merry-looking fire. Hilda can even see some coals already. Zelda has a better instinct for this too.

When Hilda drops the frayed remains of the whip in front of the fire, Zelda raises her eyebrows, but says nothing. She opens the jar and empties its contents into the fire unceremoniously. Hilda pushes in the remains of the pommell, biggest piece remaining of the cat o' nine tails. It takes longer to catch fire than their combined fingernails and floating hairs, but Hilda is patient. She pushes in one piece after the other, feeling Zelda's eyes on her, but unable to look away from the slow burning leather. She knows Zelda could get another one in a heartbeat. Their church is as fond of giving them out as the false god's missionaries are of giving out free bibles. _But she won't_. Hilda knows this. She understands her sister well enough to know that she's not a sadist, at least not outside the usual orgies, it was that _bastard_ Blackwood-

"May I?"

Hilda looks up. She's reached the last of the pieces without noticing it, a small section of leather thonging. Zelda's hand covers hers. It's warm.

Hilda blinks stupidly. Zelda's face is very close. _She's so beautiful_ is all her useless brain seems to be capable of thinking. The clip that pulls Zelda's hair away from her eyes shimmers with reflected fire light. Zelda's eyes dart to her mouth. She looks up again, and Hilda can see her thoughts as plain as day.

"May I?" She says again, voice rougher and darker than usual, and Hilda wonders if she's asking about the piece of leather or this kiss, because she leans forward a second later and brings their lips together. 

It's slow. Leisurely. Hilda opens her mouth without even thinking about it, and feels that still so new thrill when Zelda's tongue touches hers. She feels Zelda move their joined hands. Feels her lift them over the edge of the fire. Hilda would worry about burns, but it's hard to worry about anything when Zelda pauses to suck at her bottom lip, then refastens their mouths with a little sigh. Hilda opens her hand. Feels the last piece of the whip land in the fire.

Zelda draws back after another long moment. Hilda wants to pull her back into her lap immediatley. Wants to flatten herself against Zelda's body. Wants to touch every inch of her.

She breathes out through her nose. She's hot, although if that's from the fire or the kiss she's unsure. They're still holding hands. Hilda looks at them a moment. Zelda's hand is not much bigger than hers. When she held Cerberus' hand it was different. It was nice too. She swallows.

"I'll have to go back to the shop tomorrow" She says, still staring at the slow circles Zelda's thumb is rubbing into the back of her hand. She's a little nervous of looking up, but she forces herself. Zelda isn't frowning. She isn't even mid eyeroll. No, the expression on her face is the same strange  _hunger_ from last night. Hilda wonders if she looks the same. Her heart speeds up at the thought. _If they both looked like this then anyone would be able to tell just by looking-_

"I should go" She pulls her hand out of Zelda's to gesture back to the kitchen "Get lunch started."

Zelda blinks. Some of the familar haughtiness floods back into her features. "Yes, I have to go to the chapel. See to the adoption-" She flutters a hand vaguely "-and other business. I shall most likely miss lunch."

That stings. Hilda nods quickly and smiles to cover the hurt. _It's better this way_ she tells herself, _just get it over with._ This is a game, and Zelda will tire of it in a few days like she does of everything and everyone. Better to not let it go on too long. They have each other again. That's what matters.

Hilda will see to it that they have something left after this passes. Zelda might be best at extracting power from people, situations and things, but Hilda's the one who has to keep them safe. Who keeps them nurtured. She'll do that.

Even if it hurts like hell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i love angst and these two. honestly my soul is still fifteen i could write this shit all day.


	2. two

The eye-shadow pallete Sabrina gave Hilda just after she pulled her first shift might just be one of her favourite objects of this young century.

Magpie tendencies and a love of beauty have been part of Hilda's personality as long as she can remember. Mother used to scold her for having to empty her pockets of rocks after every outing. _But they're lovely,_ she'd wanted to explain. Mother never took well to pleas. Out of her parents she supposes she looks the most like her. They had the same wide-set eyes and heart-shaped mouths. But that's where the resemblance ended.

Mother had been a hellcat, only thinly buttoned-up as a Victorian doll. She'd ripped through lovers: mortals and warlocks alike. None of her children were fed at her breast. She had no patience for any of them really. Hilda often thought she'd begun dying the second she'd married their father.

Zelda and Edward took after Father both in looks and temperament. They all had the same sharp nose, a shared love of smoking, and an unnatural instinct for hunting out impropriety in Hilda. Edward at least had been content to ignore her for the most part. He'd always kept an air of having more important things on his mind.

Father and Zelda had not been so kind.

Hilda knows on Father's part it was a continuous campaign to finally turn her into a real Spellman. He took her to the bloody plains of the First Boer War when she was eleven in an effort to inspire some blood lust in her. He made her eat meat with every meal, especially after she professed to not liking the texture. While Zelda and Edward stayed at the Academy, Hilda was asked to come home to the old country every weekend, and submit to extra tutoring. Father set ardous reading lists for her every month. Smeared hand-written confessions of murderers on death row, screeching revuloutionary pamphlets, and play-by-play hunting journals were all she was allowed to openly read until she finished school.

None of it had worked.

She still kept a collection of ribbons under her pillow. She rescued drowning insects from vases. She smiled at mortals in the village without meaning to.

Unbeknownst to the rest of the family, these additional lessons contained some of the happiest moments of Hilda's childhood. Having tea with her Father in the abandoned tent of a British officer is the second thing that springs to her mind when she thinks of contentment. The wind had been warm and had smelled of blood. Father had clinked their chipped tea cups together and winked at her.

Zelda holding Sabrina, swaddled and so impossibly tiny, is always first.

***

Hilda had spent the night in the big armchair in the parlour.

It hadn't been a conscious descision, but she'd started awake, guilty already, to the click of the kitchen light. Her book slipped off her lap, and fell cover-down to the floor. She's glad of small mercies at least. It hadn't been exactly high brow literature.

Zelda stands over her, dressed and coiffed, gloved fingers resting on the handle of the antique pram they'd carted Sabrina around in. Her face doesn't betray any emotion in particular, except perhaps a very deliberate lack thereof. It could have been any other morning, except for the baby and the curious pull Hilda feels to get up and kiss her. That will pass. She hopes.

She licks her lips and blinks, rubbing her face. Zelda's face blurs, then comes back into focus, no easier to read. There is a blanket over her that she doesn't remember putting there.

"I'm going out" Zelda seems to be looking somewhere just over her armchair. She smells of a particularly cloying pre-war perfume she only uses on certain occassions. It was the scent Hilda associated with her sister returning late at night, walking slowly, with strange bruises and a smug smile. Her stomach drops quite unpleasantly.

"To see Faustus?" 

Zelda's eyes flash to her. "No" Her grip tightens on the handle "To collect her offerings. I want her adopted properly."

"Oh" Hilda says, then gets stuck staring at the high collum of her sister's dress. It was a matter of nothing to glamour bruises away, so why-

When her eyes track up, Zelda is looking at her. Now she wears an emotion that Hilda can identify all too easily.

Anger.

"We will talk Hilda" She says, and Hilda shrinks back into her chair. Because she's caught Hilda out at everything since they were children, Zelda does not miss this. She lets go of the pram, and places both hands on the armchair rests, effectively trapping Hilda. 

This close the perfume is almost unbearable, and Hilda sees where Zelda's lipstick has smudged over the v of her upper lip, and she knows for a fact her lips fit perfectly there-

"Tonight"

Her breath is hot against Hilda's lips. For a moment they hang there, and Hilda knows if Zelda kisses her now she'll do anything her sister wants, anything at all.

But Zelda doesn't move. She waits another moment, then withdraws, touches her hands to the pram, and leaves the house and Hilda without another word.

***

It was a tooth that started Hilda's harrowing back at school.

Just a tiny speck of a treasure. What a little thing to lose a sister over for nearly a decade.

The tooth had been Zelda's, one of the last milk teeth that she lost, and Hilda, who reached just to her sister's shoulder at the time, had pocketed it, marvelling at its ivory perfection, and breaking one of the most sacred witch laws without admitting it even to herself. _Burn every part of your body_ their Mother had said, again and again. But it had seemed such a waste to burn such a perfect piece of Zelda. A sacrilege almost.

She'd kept the tooth in a little biscuit tin with a doll she'd made from an old lace pillowcover, a few dried flowers, and a cheap saccharine print that showed a pair of red-cheeked girls playing in the snow.

It's one of the touchstones of her memory. The squeak when she opened the lid. The curve of Zelda's tooth when she fondled it. The sweet smell of biscuit crumbs turning to dust in the seams. She treasured it for years.

It had lasted three days in the girls dormitory.

Zelda hadn't looked up when one of her cronies (Mildred or had it been Dolly?) had crooned _'oooh what's the baby got there'_. Hilda had known they both wondered how it was going to go between them at school. Zelda had been quiet in the month leading up to Hilda's Dark Baptism. They'd stopped playing together nearly two years before, but Zelda could still be counted upon to make an improvement on the clothing of their dolls. Sometimes she'd stay, perched on the end of her bed, smelling like cigarette smoke even through her heavy perfume, and order Hilda around on how to arrange the dollhouse for hours. Those days were like soap bubbles, shiny and prone to popping at the slightest touch.

After the tooth, Zelda didn't enter a space Hilda lived in for another decade.

Hilda had thrown away most of her hoard by eighteen anyway. Father was dead, and Edward was right. It _was_ time to put childish things aside. She returned twigs and stones and acorns to the woods at the edge of the grounds. She burned the dolls Zelda used to call 'the children'. She remembered the feeling of the knife in her stomach on her first Solstice break home. Remembered Zelda's hissed _'Don't you ever embarrass me like that again'._

The make-up kit also makes a little sqeak when she opens it. Like her biscuit tin of all those years ago. “Roz gave it to me last birthday” Her dear Sabrina had said, before wrinkling her nose “Not really my thing I think”

It was Hilda's thing. The costume was a nice diversion for how much she loved the feather light touch of the brushes. Painting her face was like colouring a picture book that she hadn't known she owned. Zelda and Mother always made the whole process seem so serious. Pious almost. They both had a penchant for smoking and listening to sombre blues records as they sat in front of their vanities.

Hilda was delighted that putting on dark lipstick went just as well with a cup of tea and the radio blasting out synthesized pop hits.

***

She's at the bookshop before Cerberus, even though he lives right above it. The set of keys he gave her the day before she kissed him jingle, and Hilda wonders whether she should remove the fake set of plastic teeth that dangle from them. They feel more intimate than any love heart.

She switches on the lights, starts the coffee machine and begins setting chairs down. She does not think about kissing Zelda in front of the fire. Of the little gust of hot breath over her lips when they'd seperated. She does not think about what they did last week. She's been completley unsuccessful at both.

 _Tonight will be difficult,_ Hilda thinks as she wipes laminated tables down with a damp warm cloth. They'd have to have a real chat if Zelda wanted Hilda to sleep in her bed again. No matter how _nice_ it had been. No matter how pleasantly _something_ fluttered within her at the thought of being in her sisters arms.

Talking was not a thing any of the Spellman's excelled at.

They'd definetely never talked about the thing Hilda had seen when they were children. It hadn't been much really, just Edward's lips clumsily fastened to Zelda's neck, but Hilda never doubted that there had been more. Zelda had blushed so fiercely, and hadn't met her eye for the whole rest of the week. She knew that neither of them would have risked defilement before her sisters Dark Baptism, but still.

It had set something in her. Something that had carried her, cheerful and self-contained, through the last decades.

Before, she'd always imagined the family divided into careful units. Mother was alone of course, or with whatever lover she'd taken that month. Mother didn't tolerate others for long. But Father and Edward formed a pair, always ensconed in their grown-up conversations, which left Hilda... and Zelda.

When they still shared a nursery, they'd been nearly inseperable. Zelda always decided what they should do. But that was right all those years ago. She was the eldest, the one who sang Hilda to sleep when she had a nightmare, the one who shook her head when it wasn't a good day to disturb Mummy, and the one who named their dolls. 

Young Hilda hadn't had the emotional vocabulary yet to tell Zelda that she didn't mind the kissing (she did) but that she did mind that they'd changed the units without as much as a by-your-leave. She hadn't known how to say that Zelda meant everything to her, and that she'd never even suspected that her feelings weren't reciprocated.

That they weren't always to be together.

The shop bell jingles, and Cee shoulders in with a blast of cold wind, carrying a stack of trays lined with hamburger buns. 

"Oh is the bakery delivery here already?" Hilda says, glad of the interruption to ther thoughts, leaving the tables and holding the door open for him "Thought they weren't meant to come till Thursday."

He darts a quick look at her, then away, like a man who's looked at the sun. He lets her take the top tray.

 _Oh_ , Hilda thinks, wondering how she could have forgotten for even a moment. _Right_.

Here is the first heart she's ever broken. Another new experience neatly wrapped just for her. She'd seen how Mother and Zelda dealt with ex-lovers, but she didn't want to do that. She'd always thought there must be a gentle way to go about the dreadful business.

She looks at Cerberus' back as he passes her on the way to the counter. She hands him her tray in the kitchen and watches as he stacks it carefully above the fry-cook's station. He adjusts the second tray to make sure the corners line up. That was one of the things she first liked about him. His inherent human messiness that was occassionally undercut by a nearly old-fashioned properness in his business dealings. 

She puts her hand on his back, where the space between his shoulder blades would be, if not for the puffy winter jacket.

"Cee-"

He turns to her, and Hilda sees herself, betrayed and not understanding why. She feels awful suddenly. Like the horror that she is to mortals for the first time in years. She folds her other hand along his shoulder and pulls him in for a hug. 

"I'm so sorry" She says into the fur lining his collar, feeling tears welling up, for no good reason at all. 

It doesn't take much imagination to see the whole thing from his side. He'd given her a job. She'd laughed at his jokes and he'd complimented her baking. They had something, a comfortable spark, that Hilda had allowed to be fanned into a fire. She'd kissed him. He'd kissed her. He'd rented her the empty flat next to his. They'd rolled around in each others beds, Cee understanding that Hilda was not ready to get beyond heavy petting, moving towards _more_ at a comfortable pace. She'd liked the way his curls felt when she cupped his head. The thought of spending the next fifty years with him had made her feel warm and safe.

A vision of Zelda, naked and flushed in her bed, taking two of Hilda's fingers into her mouth obliterates the memory. Her hair had been fanned out and her eyes as dark as Hilda had ever seen them. Her heart feels like it's pumping too much blood at the memory. She starts to move back from Cerberus, but he holds her there.

He leans his chin on top of her head, and Hilda allows him to hold her another moment. She hasn't put her wig on yet, and his breath is warm against the crown of her head. His lips tilt down and she breaks away from him at the first kiss on the edge of her hair. His hands still hang open towards her. He reminds her of Zelda then, just yesterday morning, reaching for Hilda and _pleading_.

Perhaps she's just due to get all her romance out of the way in one week. And then the next two ceturies can be peaceful again.

"Hilly," He begins, frowning, and that makes the tears start in earnest, because that awful nickname is all him, and it's such a sweet thing to do for another person. Ever since her second shift, that smile and _Hilly_ -

"It's _her_ isn't it?" He says and Hilda freezes. If Cerberus is saying what she thinks he's saying, then they're in business for a pretty heavy memory enchantment, which could go all kinds of wrong because of how many weeks she'd have to erase-

"She's said something to you" He slams the grill next to him "This isn't you-"

 _Relief_. It won't do to let him see how relieved she is. But pinning the fault on Zelda would be the coward's way out. Hilda will stop this nonesense right in its tracks. "'Fraid not love." She makes her tone very firm. She wipes the tears from her cheeks. She'll have to check her make-up in a minute.

"This is all me."

***

To say the rest of her shift is awkward would be an understatement.

Cerberus is hurt, and it translates as a foul mood that pervades the entire atmosphere of the book shop. Customers drink their coffee at tongue-burning speeds. No one orders a sit down meal after taking one look at Dr Cee's face. They blast Leonard Cohen through the speakers for nearly the whole day, until even Hilda wonders if life is worth living.

It's only after he's made a whole group of school-aged teenagers take flight without even attempting to order milkshakes, that Hilda decides enough.

"I'm going to ask you this only once" She says levelling Cee with a look she reserved for post-tantrum Sabrina "Do you want me to continue working here or not?"

He looks at her helplessly, and Hilda knows she's won. "No-Yes, I don't know." He says, looking at his empty shop, actually seeming to see it for the first time "I actually do need you. No one makes a coffee like you."

"The secret is in the angle when you're frothing the milk" Hilda replies evenly. It's also in using a tiny bit of magic to achive a perfect coffee every time, but that's neither here nor there. "And if you want me to stay, get a hold of yourself." She looks at him an decides to rip the band-aid off as quick as she can "I'll collect the rest of my things after work tonight. I'll leave the key under the doormat. Alright?"

"Alright." Cee says, and he doesn't look like he's about to burst into tears. Slow progress, but progress.

***

Hilda doesn't get home until well past ten.

The house is dark, and she knows the kitchen well enough to manouver around without switching on any lights. A cup of tea and the rest of her book is the only thing she wants after that nightmare of a day. She let's the kettle boil, and wanders through the parlour, knowing her book is on the table near her chair, feeling for both by touch alone.

An arm hooks around her waist. "You certainly took your time" Zelda's breath is warm against her right ear. She bites her ear lobe, very gently just framing it with her teeth, then licks. "Again" She nuzzles against Hilda's neck.

Hilda is too busy getting her heart rate under control to answer. She didn't scream, but it was a close one. The urge to twist in her sisters arms is a strong one.

"What in Satan's name are you doing sister?" She says, and feels that hidden strength she knows she has, but is loath to draw on too often. It's the only thing that will reign in her sister, and she fears overusing it.

Now there's something at her throat. A knife. Probably one of the kitchen knives. If Zelda murders her with the bread knife again, she'll hear some words on it, but the edge is thin, and only bites slightly as it glides over her skin. Good. A clean murder. 

"You're going to kill me?" A wave of hoplessness crashes over her, surprising her. She's used to this the way some people are used to going to the dentist "So we're back to that again?"

"Love and death Hilly" Zelda mumbles into her throat. It doesn't make a lot of sense, and Hilda frowns, turning in her hold, mindful of the knife. Maybe the whole baby business is straining her sister's cool more than she thought. Or maybe the blood poisoning clouded her brain.

"None of that today Zelda. Let me go." They're face to face now. Zelda hasn't moved, so she's effectively tucked herself into the curve at Hilda's neck. The knife and the hand holding it is trapped between them. The other hand holds her hip in a vice grip. Hilda is not sure what she feels more, Zelda's shallow breaths or the point of the blade gently digging into the space between her breasts.

"Don't you want to play a little?" Zelda's voice is light, and suddenly Hilda is scared. They are at the edge of something, something she has to pull them back from. If she allows Zelda to even steal a kiss this way-

The blunt edge of the knife presses into the hollow her throat. "I bet I could make you come at knifepoint"

"And then you'd kill me" Hilda says, keeping her voice toneless "What romance. Now let me go Zelda. You wanted to talk. Let's actually talk."

Hilda waits another moment, then picks Zelda's hand  up from where it's wandered to her ass and steps back. What she can see of Zelda's face in the gloom blanches. The click of her swallowing is very loud in the darkness. But she puts down the knife on top of Hilda's sappy paperback. She takes a shuddering breath. "I'm sorry"

"Yes well, you really have something to be sorry for now" Hilda snaps. She judges it safe to turn away from her sister and switch on the little spindly lamp by the love-seat. She turns, and prays to Satan that they come out of this somewhat intact.

Zelda is still standing in the center of the room. She's still dressed to the nines, but her hair has lost some of it's uniform wave and the perfume has faded. She's beautiful. Hilda schools herself not to look away. She is going to salvage her family out of this mess. No matter what the cost.

"I don't know what to do." Zelda finally says, so quietly that Hilda has to step closer to hear her.

"You don’t know how to kill me-"

"How to make you stay." Zelda's eyes flash and the fire in them stops Hilda in her tracks "How to convince you to stay with me."

Hilda sits down on the love-seat behind her. Her legs don't seem to be doing a great deal to support her suddenly. 

"Oh love, I'm not going anywhere." She rubs her face with her hands, then pats the space next to her.

Zelda, arms tight around herself. She stays where she is, a stiff pillar of elegance, staring at Hilda.

"But you are" Even in her current state, Zelda's derisive look is still enough to make Hilda want to sink into the ground "I can smell him on you you know." She gestures to the crown of her head. Her nails are painted a deep plum and shorter than she usually keeps them. She must have done them this morning.

"You don't have very much faith in me do you?" Hilda says rolling her eyes, and getting up, takes Zelda's hand and pulls her down. She keeps their hands joined once they sit.

Zelda is silent. She keeps blinking at their hands. Hilda would offer her a hankerchief but is mindful of interrupting the moment. It had been her fault after all. Zelda might have kissed her, but she had to go and take it further, she had to go and pull of all her sister's clothes, and stick her hands where they had no business being. This is her mess to clean up just as much as Zelda's.

Zelda's shoulder's shake, and then she lets out a tiny pathetic sob. Hilda feels that furtive sound as though it were a knife in her heart. She pulls Zelda to her, much the same as she might have done if her sister were Sabrina, and whispers nonesense reassurances in her ear. And if she rots in limbo for it, it _will_ be alright, and _no one is going anywhere_ , and she does sincerely _doubt the house would survive a month without her_ -

Then Zelda's lips are on hers, silencing her promises, and it feels so sublime, so right to lean back into the cushions, and let Zelda take charge because really, she always does know what's best-

"No, no-" Hilda pushes her sister off her, and sits up against the cushions at the very far end of the couch. Zelda is red and panting, and has to be swatted again for her to remove her hands from where they were pawing at Hilda's breasts. 

"This is about Edward isn't it?"

And there it is. Hilda doesn't want to be that transparent. But Zelda has a knack for seeing everything about her at a glimpse, just like Father, just like Edward. Not that any of them had understood her any better for it. 

"It's about me love." She sighs "I know this is all business as usual for you, but I- I won't recover when you get bored of me."

She doesn't dare to look up as she says this. It might be the most dangerous thing she's ever admitted to her sister. If anything she has just handed Zelda the final weapon to use for all time: how much Hilda needs her. She looks down and can't believe she's still in her polyester costume, can't believe she's having this conversation made up like the bride of Frankenstein, _thank Satan_ at least the wig is safely deposited on the kitchen counter-

"Is that what you think?"

Hilda keeps looking at the white topography of her costume dress. "Don't you see how much better it would be to put this to bed?" She says, speaking more to her feet than her sister. She does wish she could have thought of a turn of phrase not related to the bedroom, but it would have to do. "Think of Sabrina, and Ambrose- and the coven-"

"Is that what you think of me?" Hands frame her face, and force her to look up. Zelda's eyes glitter and she nods in grudging confirmation. "So little?"

"I'm not judging you Zelda," Hilda would never, Zelda could fuck the false god himself and Hilda would still love her "I'm just protecting what we have. Don't you see we finally have the family we played at all those years ago?" She manages a smile that Zelda doesn’t return "They look a little different than we imagined but-"

"I've loved you before I understood what the concept meant"

Zelda says it roughly, as if it's been beaten out of her. There's colour in her cheeks now, but her eyes trap Hilda with their intensity.

Hilda is momentarily stunned. "That's very sweet of you to say-" She falters, because it's a line almost straight out of the trashiest of her novels. Never in all her life had she thought someone would say something like that to her-

Zelda releases her face. Now she's truly angry. Hilda feels the sharp crackle of her magic in the air around them. "You don't understand. It's not _sweet_. The things I wanted to do with you for the past two centuries. _To you_. But you were always different than us, too pure by half, so I found others- I found-"

"Edward?" Now Hilda is annoyed too. How daft does Zelda think she is? "Are you expecting me to believe this tripe? That I spurned your advances as what? An eight year old? You left me behind Zelda." She hisses then voices what she's known to be the truth since she found Edward and Zelda "You always have. I've made my peace with it."

She makes to get up. This is one of those conversations that neither of them would ever be brave enough to continue. If she can just escape, things will be awkward for a spell, but then they'll settle. They'll return to normal. They'll raise their niece and nephew, they'll fight, they'll run their business, and they'll leave this madness behind.

Zelda holds on to her. And suddenly Hilda is not so sure.

"It was you." Her eyes are bright "Always you"

Hilda sinks back down. "What do you want from me?"

"The same thing I've always wanted." Zelda voice wavers a little on the last word "Stay. Please."

Zelda removes her hands. Hilda watches as if in a dream as her sister gets slots herself back into part of her usual cool composition.

"But what do you want Hilda? That's the real question."

Hilda doesn't think in two centuries any of her family has ever asked her this. She looks at her sister. She notices for the first time that Zelda has moved away from her deliberately, as if to give her space in every sense of the word to decide on her answer. And when she looks into herself, it's there already, clear as the blood splatter on an old military tent, sharp as her mother's anger, and smooth as Zelda's long lost tooth.

"You." She answers, feeling the truth of it, the home in the words "Our life together. You."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry lads that this took a minute. i finally made a plan for this fic and it's four chapters now instead of three so... hhurah?
> 
> P.S: can i say that i love that this pairing's tag seems to be 'see u cats in hell'


	3. three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> hi it's been a minute and im sorry
> 
> in other news ive crossed three continents, swum naked in many river and oceans and bought a house. wtf aye.
> 
> get ready for me to comment on ALL the fic that I've missed JFC you guys have been BUSY.

"Let's go to bed"

Zelda's eyes widen. Hilda takes her hand, where it rests in her lap. She plays with Zelda's limp fingers before looking up.

Zelda is still looking at her intently. 

"Hilda-"

"That's what I want Zelda." She says, feeling like she's stepped into some great hall of truth hithero unknown to her. She imagines her voice echoing on distant walls. She cannot lie here. "For you to take me to bed, for us to see that baby to safety." She looks at their fingers. "Maybe for you to kiss me a little." She ventures, feeling strangely shy about this comparatively innocent request. 

Now Zelda's fingers tighten around her own. Hilda doesn't dare to look up. She closes her eyes, feeling the long day wash over her.

The first touch of Zelda's lips is soft.

There's another word she's never associated with her sister. They touch her mind like the spider silk of her familiars.

Soft. Gentle. Sweet.

But the kiss is all these things. They keep their lips closed and their hands clasped. Zelda keeps repositioning her lips. First square on her mouth. Then the upper lip. Her chin, barely catching the edge of her lower lip. The corner of her mouth. Her jaw. Her cheek. But always back to her mouth, like a moth to a flame. She breathes through her nose. Her hair tickles Hilda's cheek. She smells of smoke. Hilda wonders what expression is on Zelda's face. She keeps her eyes shut. She can handle sound and touch, but sight might undo her after the last week.

"Hilda-" The words are hushed, but she can hear the strain in Zelda's voice as if they've been screaming at each other for hours. It used to precede a shovel, an icepick, anything at hand really, making intimate contact with her frontal lobe. Now she doesn't know what it signals. For the first time in her lifelong acquaintance with her sister, Hilda is lost.

Fingertips touch her throat. She feels the edge of Zelda's nails briefly, then her palm lowers across Hilda's neck. It feels cool against her heated skin. She expects Zelda to pull her in now, expects her inherent violence, but she just stays there, hand curved along her neck, lips peppering kisses across the apple of her left cheek. Zelda's breath on her eyelid makes her shiver.

This time when the lips return to her mouth, she reciprocates. Just slightly. Wets her lips and moves them weakly against Zelda's questing mouth. 

Zelda's sharp intake of breath is what finally makes Hilda open her eyes. 

Zelda's kissing her with her eyes open. Like she doesn't want to miss a single second of this. Like Hilda might snatch it all back again. She should know better. When it came to it, Hilda's never been able to deny her older sister anything.

"Take me to bed." She whispers against Zelda's lips, knowing it's a line from a novel two romances ago, and not caring. It does the trick. Zelda's pupils are blown so large and black, Hilda sees her own flushed reflection in them.

***

The house is quiet around them.

She expected Zelda to loose her cool, to bite and scratch and tear, and do all the things she's always bragged about doing to other lovers while Hilda squirmed and tucked all the words away inside herself to be examined later. Instead, it's strange how formal the walk is. It feels loaded. Important. Like a bridal march. Zelda keeps looking at her, partially with what Hilda is beginning to recognise as arousal, but _something_ else too.

This _something_  compels her sister to pull away every time Hilda leans in for a kiss. Against the bannister. In the corridor. Against her own bedroom door.

It unnerves Hilda. Because in stark contrast, her earlier control is gone.

She has to fight not to grab Zelda's hand and shove it up her skirt. She has to content herself with rubbing circles into Zelda's palm with her thumb, circles so forceful and fast that they must surely be hurting by now. She drapes herself against Zelda's shoulder and kisses her neck, her cheekbone, any part of her sister she can reach really. Her knees aren't doing all that much to support her anyway. Zelda's breathing stutters when Hilda nips gently at her throat. She's pushed away then, and she feels the fear rising, because maybe this was all one long play on Zelda's part-and now comes the ice-pick, the butcher's knife, the sash from her favourite nightgown-

Zelda locks the bedroom door, mumbling a few shaky incantations, then turns back to Hilda.

A single shaft of moonlight illuminates her room. Hilda has unwittingly stumbled back into it, feeling unsure for the first time. Zelda is just looking at her. Hilda's well aware that the handful of fumbling rolls with Cee never blossomed into what anyone would call slow love-making. Her one time with Zelda was all fire, spit and tongues. She’s awfully conscious of the fat on her hips, the way her cotton underwear cuts into her thighs, and the complete lack of allure she projects. She's not made to be looked at. She's made to mend, to cajole, to comfort and maybe to kiss in the heat of the moment. She will not hold up to closer inspection.

Zelda approaches her. Runs her hands over her hips, her thighs. There's an expression on her face. _Reverence_. Hilda's heart beats hard.

Zelda kneels and touches the hem of her dress. She looks up at Hilda for permission. Hilda nods after a long moment. She lifts the garment slowly. She kisses Hilda's knees. She kisses her thighs and the soft curve of each hip. She kisses her stomach, the side of each breast, her chest and, holding the dress bunched at her chest, finally Hilda's mouth.

"Lift." 

Hilda lifts her arms and allows Zelda to push her tongue into her mouth as she pulls the dress clean over her head, and tosses it away. Hilda wants to tell her to be careful, that it needs to be hung up, but Zelda's hands cup the base of her skull, and the thought flies away from her. She kneads her way down, still kissing Hilda, until her hands find the clasp of Hilda's bra.

Hilda lets her struggle for one long moment before reaching back, swatting her hands away and undoing the hooks herself. 

Zelda’s hands move to her sides, dig into a roll of flesh over her ribs she’s gotten quite clever at hiding with flowery tailoring. Zelda doesn’t seem to notice. She’s begun pushing Hilda back towards her bed, not letting her breathe, and Hilda knows this will be good. Knows it will be wonderful in fact, but still she stays planted to the spot.

"What’s the matter now?" Zelda breathes against her lips, and there’s something almost unhinged in the ferocity of the kiss that delays Hilda’s answer. "Tell me." She opens her eyes, lips still touching Hilda's. " _Tell me._ " She says again, anger creeping into her tone. The anger is what anchors Hilda. This is an emotion of Zelda's she's jotted down and indexed like one of her recipe cards. This she knows.

They kiss again, and Zelda's hands work their way around to her front, and _oh,_ why had no one ever told her how good this could be? Why had no one let her into this secret? Even Zelda herself had always made it sound dirty and debased- when really it was everything- life-giving- better than the best batch of muffins, better than it all. She's pulling back just about to ask just that, when Zelda growls and rips her mouth away. A strand of strawberry blonde hair floats between them. " _What is the matter?_ " Zelda grits out, enunciating every word like she's selling an expensive funeral, this tone completely at odds with how her right hand has Hilda's left nipple in a loose pinch, and her left rests in a territory that isn't quite hip anymore. "If you're having second thoughts-"

Hilda surfaces from the thick fog of her desire, blinks at her sister, and wonders how she missed this. This harsh and painful love. How did she sit with Zelda all these decades in their sun-drenched kitchen, in their cold mortuary, and in their dark bedroom when this was waiting beneath the wave-chopped surface of their bickering?

"Are you frightened?" The words take her back to the third time Zelda had killed her, just before she left the Academy for her Shanghai-bound steamer. Nineteen and impossibly beautiful, she’d stuck a fire poker in Hilda’s gut, touched her face and asked _‘Are you frightened?’_

 _"Yes."_ Seventeen-year old Hilda had said almost in tandem with Hilda of now. She’d been afraid Zelda would never return. She was afraid of who they were to each other.

For a moment Zelda looks stricken. Her hands tighten on Hilda, and for a moment Hilda wonders if Zelda would let her go if she truly didn't want this. Then her expression clears. She looks at Hilda and seems to see her for the first time.

"It’s alright little sister" She ghosts her fingers along Hilda’s exposed arms. When she draws them towards the bed, Hilda follows. She sits them down gently, and arranges Hilda in her lap. They used to do this as children. Hilda thinks she hasn't done this in nigh two-hundred years. Still her fingers find a strand of Zelda's hair and winds it around her index finger. She pulls Zelda in. _'This is how butterflies kiss'_ She'd told her sister once, barely five and very sure of herself. Zelda hadn't protested when Hilda pulled her close and batted their eyelashes together. It had been their goodnight kiss for only a year at best. Just one of their many rituals before she'd _seen_ and Zelda had begun flinching away.

But Zelda doesn't flinch when Hilda leans in now. Hilda knows she remembers.

Zelda kisses her and draws back. Hilda does something she's wanted since it was deemed 'too childish'. She tucks her face into the curve at Zelda's neck. Now they truly are what they used to be. Even if their forms have changed and the years have rushed between them like so much water. Hilda is home again at last.

For a moment they're both quiet. Zelda smells like the camellias in her perfume this close. Her pulse slows against Hilda's cheek, even as her hands tighten. She's thinking on something. Hilda waits.

"Hilda?" She finally says. Hilda _hmmms_  against the curve of her throat in reply, and watches the goosebumps rise in response. 

"I don't -" Zelda's throat works and she breaks off. "You will be sleeping in my bed." Her tone is very final "I’m afraid that point is non-negotiable."

Hilda shivers, but nods.

Something settles in the air between them then. She lets herself be guided out of her room, into the cold hallway, and into Zelda’s room. Zelda tucks her in, then slips under the covers next to her. Hilda tucks her face back into the juncture where her sister's neck becomes her shoulder. The lamps is extinguished with a click. The baby is quiet in her crib. Somewhere in the woods an owl calls.

"When do you want to perform the ritual?" Hilda asks, hushed from the caresses and the familiar warmth of her sister.

"Tomorrow night." A pause "If that suits you?"

Hilda hums in assent then adds- "Awful lot of time to spend at the coven to work out a bit of blood rite magic."

She lets the unspoken question hang.

"I had other business" Zelda says, tucking Hilda's hair behind her ear. Hilda wonders how she existed for the last couple of hundred years without this fluttering intimacy.

"With Blackwood." Hilda mumbles because she’s drowsy and unable to contain her suspicion.

The silence stretches so long this time that Hilda is certain she dreams the answer.

"No," She thinks she hears Zelda say at last "With you."

***

Hilda wakes with a start.

The bed is empty, but she can still feel Zelda’s vine like limbs around her. The room is bathed in uncertain winter morning light.

She gets dressed in her favourite dress. The day seems to demand it. It feels like a holiday, like a wave just cresting over the horizon, bringing a strange scent from an old country.

Downstairs a miracle has occurred. 

Zelda has made breakfast.

Hilda recognises it as the breakfast she made when they first moved back to Greendale in the early seventies. It's a lot of cold cuts, gherkins and fancy cheeses, and coarse bread. A Russian breakfast from a witch who'd lived there for less than a decade. A mere moment in a witches life. She's probably over boiled the eggs, but for now they sit in their eggcups, looking white and perfect. A pot of coffee stands next to a branch of blossoming mountain yarrow that Hilda knows doesn't come from continental America. She wonders how Zelda convinced Vinegar Tom to make a transatlantic journey before breakfast.

The baby is in her perambulator, swathed in white blankets and fast asleep. _White is for witching_ , Hilda remembers, and sees their mother in her lace dresses more vividly than she has in years. It's not a pleasant memory exactly. For the first time she wonders what their parents would think about the path her and Zelda are contemplating. It's not forbidden _per se_ , but some of the more traditional members of the coven (Blackwood certainly) would oppose anything longer than a tryst. The coven always needs children and they are both of child-bearing centuries still.

Lost in these unpleasant thoughts, she almost misses her sister at first, because for the first time in nearly half a decade, Zelda is not hidden behind a newspaper. She's next to the coffee-maker, and has been watching as her sister takes in her preparations. She smiles at Hilda uncertainly, looks just about to speak when-

"Morning Aunties" Sabrina brushes past her with the quickest of kisses, and neatly punctures whatever bubble the last minutes lived in. She's dressed for her mortal school, and begins a doomed attempt to wrap a boiled egg in a bit of loose notebook paper, while also munching on a corner of hard bread. Hilda takes both away from her, and sets about assembling a proper lunch. She butters the corner of bread first and hands it back to her niece. 

"Not late are we?" Zelda says, handing Sabrina a cup of coffee. She drops two sugar cubes in the cup without having to ask. 

Sabrina shakes her head, looking thunderous. "I think something's going on between Harvey and Roz."

There's a moment of silence.

"Would you like me to hex both of them into forgetting their names?"

"No!" Sabrina squeals just as Hilda groans " _Zelda._ "

"Just an offer" Zelda says, holding up her hands and rolling her eyes at both of them. "I wouldn't be able to perform the magic for another week anyway." She touches the edge of the pram. "We're sending her on her way tonight"

Instantly Sabrina has forgotten her high school woes. "Tonight?" She looks as Hilda. "But that's so soon! I thought you were going to keep her- she _needs_ to be here-"

"Whatever do you mean by that Sabrina?" Zelda narrows her eyes.

Sabrina flushes, and shrugs her shoulders. She mumbles something.

Hilda feels a stab of fear. "Sabrina-" Zelda beats her to it "Blackwood hasn't said anything-"

"No!" Sabrina looks stricken "Nothing like that." She looks between them again. "It's just-" 

"Lamb, you can tell us." Hilda coaxes "We won't be angry." _At least not too much_ , she thinks, looking at Zelda and already running through all the defensive charms she has pertaining to toddlers. How badly could their niece manage to muck up things in twenty-four hours? Surely not enough to interfere with the ritual-

"Sabrina!" Zelda barks.

Sabrina flinches, and Hilda hates it, shoots Zelda an admonishing look over her head, just as the girl finally sinks down on a chair, and drops her head into her hands. 

"I'll be finished with school in two years." Comes the muffled explanation from between her laced hands.

Hilda stares at her blankly. Then looks up at Zelda. Who seems to have understood something Hilda is missing completely. She's not used to the equation being this way.

"And?" She prompts. 

"And I was thinking of going to the old country-" Her niece continues looking between them "-to see the original temples to the Dark Lord, and read the ancient scrolls." Hilda parrots her niece. 

"We've talked about this pet," Even if Sabrina thinks she's fooling them into thinking it's anything other than research into challenging Lucifer himself. "And we all think it's an excellent idea."

"But if I'm not here, and Ambrose isn't here, and the baby isn't here" Sabrina says slowly. "You and Auntie Zee won't have anyone to look after. And then you won't be together." She looks up at Hilda with a pensive look that is all Edward. "And you have to be together otherwise you'll be unhappy."

Hilda's immediate reaction is to comfort. Sometimes Sabrina can be so unexpectedly sweet it blindsides her. "We've lived apart a long time before you and Ambrose happened poppet."

Her niece surprises her again "Yeah and I asked Ambrose about it and he said he always thought of you as his miserable aunts in those years." She narrows her eyes at Hilda "He said he visited you once in Kenya and it was the most depressing holiday of his life."

The sensation of her emotions having been so easily read, even all these decades later, stings. She'd been wildly unhappy in post-war Africa. She'd waged a war on her liver, had her hair in that terrible beehive style for most of the decade and had seen Zelda all of once at an Ambassador's dinner in Fez. Her sister had been on the arm of a handsome Egyptian warlock and Hilda, who had thought herself to be doing alright until that very moment, had seen the future in one terrible glance.

Oh she would be having a word with Ambrose about keeping his mouth shut about things he didn't know about.

She looks to Zelda for support in whatever this new thing is and finds- Zelda looks like she is on the verge of tears. Her lips are clamped tight and folds her newspaper in jerky motions. 

"Zelda?" She says uncertainly. Zelda looks at her, eyes glittering, and Hilda feels something heavy settle in her stomach. Maybe she does recall the Egyptian suitor, maybe she regrets-

"Ambrose is quite right Sabrina" Zelda says "We were fools."

Hilda can only stare open mouthed at her sister.

Zelda ignores her and pulls up a chair next to Sabrina, sits and tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear. "But you don't have to worry." 

Hilda stares down at the two of them in a trance. It all feels unreal. 

"Baby or no, your Aunt Hilda and I belong together." 

Sabrina looks back at Hilda. "Are you guys saying what I think you're saying?"

Hilda braces herself for admonishment. Her niece is half-mortal after all, and in the mortal world what they've just told her is wrong, _disgusting_ \- _incestous_ -

Sabrina launches herself in Zelda's arms. She's babbling a string of words, that eventually Hilda discerns into a long mumble of _"ohmygodohmygodohmygod"_ She expects Zelda to chastise her niece for this improper use of the false gods name, but Zelda just hugs Sabrina fiercely. They pull apart.

"I _knew_ you could do it" Sabrina says, and Hilda frowns because what on Satan's green earth have they been talking about "I knew you loved each other."

Then she has an armful of niece. "I'm so glad you're back." Sabrina mumbles against her cardigan. Then she steps back and wipes her cheeks, grinning from ear to ear. Suddenly her eyes flicker to the window and her smile falls "And okay, I'm super late, I gotta go."

She ducks her head back into the kitchen one last time "Please don't screw this up!" She squeaks and Hilda has the distinct feeling that she's talking to both of them, not just Zelda. Her head appears once more "Love you!" Then she flashes them both a double thumbs up, and is gone with the loud slamming of the front door.

"Well." Zelda says, and leans back into Hilda's stomach. Hilda clasps her shoulder for support, and Zelda's hand covers hers.

They stay like that for a long time.

***

At midday on the dot they're in the clearing for the first half of the ritual. Zelda fussing with the blankets swaddling the baby. Hilda is slightly loath to use homemade honey to slather on to the ground, but store-bought just didn't feel right. She sprinkles little pinches of her quickly assembled herb mix. Flecks of nettle, picked out of tea bags, for protection, frost covered moss for a safe journey, and dried rose petals from her own garden for love.

She loves this half of the ritual and is glad Zelda is letting her take point on it. Her older sister will lead the midnight version. All magic is like this at its core principle. Halves, and counterpoints. Light and dark. Sun and moon. She looks at Zelda again, tucking the lace at the soft baby chin, and pretending very hard that she isn't in tears.

There is a part of her that wishes they could have just driven to Maine and handed the child over. She knows somewhere in the woods the childless couple Zelda sniffed out is performing a similar ritual. She wonders what herbs the wife chose. 

They finish a scarce half hour later. This part of the ritual really isn't that academic. Nature does most of the work for you if you relax and let it. 

Zelda picks the baby girl out of the white blanket heap around her, while Hilda stations her familiars to keep watch over the clearing until they return.

Zelda walks carefully, balancing the child in her arms. They've agreed by mutual consent not to return to their house. The child's time there is done. Instead they've turned farther into the woods, over a babbling brook Hilda knows they drowned a witch in three hundred years prior, and finally into what used to be a field, and is now rapidly becoming forest.

Mother knew the family that lived in what is turning into a wreck of a barn. When she had grown up here there'd been sheep, and geese, when the map was still full of blank spots. Not that Mother ever told Hilda. She'd met the old man who still lived here when they first arrived back in the seventies. He'd met her walking in the woods, and told her there used to be a girl who looked like her in these parts when he was a child. _A beautiful rose_ he'd smiled, and Hilda had shivered.

But now they make camp near what used to be the hen house. She unpacks their picnic, while Zelda wraps the child in an old knitted blanket.

She holds Zelda and the child while her sister pretends not to cry. 

"It's not safe for her here." She says again and again into Zelda's hair.

"I promised." Zelda says after a long moment "I promised Lady Blackwood I'd keep her children safe-"

"And you are keeping her safe" Hilda returns. She pulls Zelda up to face her. "When have you ever failed us love?" She asks "Me, Ambrose, Sabrina- any of us?"

Zelda just shakes her head. This Hilda cannot let stand. "Never." She says shaking Zelda a little. "Not once when it really mattered."

She kisses Zelda. They stay huddled for a long moment. Then Zelda seems to rouse herself. She set the child down on the blanket. The baby immediately pulls a blade of grass towards her with fat questing fingers. The sun light is dappled on her face. Hilda smiles. This one will be fine. She feels it as truly as she has foreseen anything.

Zelda looks at the child too. She doesn't seem to share Hilda's confidence, but she wipes her tears away and relaxes marginally.

"You wanted to know why I spent so long at the Academy." 

Hilda, a little thrown by this change of subject kisses her temple. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to-"

Zelda looks at her then. Her face is troubled. "But I do." She touches Hilda's face. "I managed it."

Hilda waits.

"You're to be restored to the coven. To the church."

She stares at Zelda for a long moment. "I was excommunicated." It was a fair punishment for what she had helped Diana commit. She misses the warmth of the coven, the feeling of community, and had been nearly half mad with worry when the Feast lottery was drawn. But still. "It was a just punishment love."

"And I've convinced them to reverse it."

"How?" She asks, and unbidden, awful images of Zelda on her knees, on her back, while Faustus has his way with her slam into her minds eye "How Zelda?" She asks, and pushes Zelda down on the blanket, pins her hands up above her head, and swings her knees on either side of her hips. She wants to cry. She wants to throw up. How could Zelda have- she'd prefer to rot outside of the gates of witch limbo forever-

"I found a subclause in one of the old books of order." Zelda frowns, the crow lines around her eyes, the ones that only started to appear since Sabrina exploded into her teenage years, tightening, and Hilda wonders if they could have died not crossing this line "Hilda, by the Dark Lord, calm yourself what-"

But Hilda's kissing her, gripping her hair, and wrenching her jacket off. Zelda rolls them, and Hilda pulls her hand under her skirt, and babbles "I want-I want-"

Zelda doesn't have to wait for her to articulate it. Her thumb brushes against the front of Hilda's underwear. There's a bit of fumbling, and then fingers are pushing the fabric aside, and there. Zelda pulls back from the kiss and catches her eye. Her fingers thrust shallowly, her other hand strokes Hilda's lower back and Hilda wraps her legs around her waist to pull her in. Zelda's thumb pushes on her clit. 

"You'll be safe in the coven again." Zelda watches her staccato breathing, and, inside, begins to twist her fingers. "No more mortals. No more of their world. With me in our coven. Like it was always meant to be."

More than anything it's her sisters smile that undoes Hilda. It's such a rare sight, especially this past decade. She pulls Zelda down for another kiss, and at the first touch of her tongue she comes. Zelda's mouth catches her moan. Her sister licks Hilda's lips. Licks her way down to her neck, where she begins to bite. 

"More" Hilda rasps "I want more" 

Zelda growls and pulls back. "Do you trust me?" Hilda licks her lips and nods.

"There was a bit of magic going around in my final year" She mumbles at Hilda's neck. "Very vogue for a second or two."

Something shifts between them. Hilda feels the warm flicker of magic near her stomach. "I never wanted to try it. But one day I thought of you and-"

Something solidifies against her stomach. 

"Remember when I killed you with the firepoker?"

"Mmm" is all Hilda is capable of groaning. "It was a poor substitute for what I really wanted to do."

And then she pushes into Hilda.

For a moment they hang there, then Hilda groans, and Zelda moves. "I can't, sweet Satan, I can't-"

Her hips move and set a rhythm. It stings a little. She's bigger than Cee and more enthusiastic than Hilda can ever recall him being. But then she presses her fingers just above where the new part of her anatomy is pressing into Hilda, and Hilda clasps the globes of her ass where her dress has hiked up to-

Zelda convulses, and Hilda braces herself for the flood of warmth that always followed when Cee did this, even if it was contained by the condom, but Zelda's magicked dick just pulsates in her and then she's coming. The orgasm seems to go on forever. Time slows and Hilda and Zelda are at its centre. She sees a chrysalis. A pale flower blooming. Her hands, little and weak, digging their way out of her first grave. Then with a burst of warmth, the intrusion in her evaporates, and it's just Zelda, sweaty and trembling, in her arms.

Evening has set in. The baby still sleeps nearby, and Hilda loves Zelda. Zelda's looking up at the winter sky. Her eyes glitter.

"It's like arriving home."

"What's that love?" Hilda asks feeling sleepy and content.

Zelda turns to her "You. This. It's like arriving home after a long journey." The corners of her mouth turn up slightly, and Hilda doesn't think she's ever seen this side of Zelda,serene and open. Her fingers brush Hilda's lips again. "Would you mind very much if I was always inside you?"

Hilda laughs now. She nips at Zelda's fingers. Then she nods at the baby. "We ought to get started."

"Yes." Zelda says, but she's still looking at Hilda.

 

***

The other half of the ritual goes off without a hitch.

Zelda's chanting is sightly raspy, but Hilda knows her own clear mezzo-soprano covers any shortcomings. She watches with some trepidation as Zelda hands the babe off to the two shadowy figures that have appeared in the circle. They hear the clear note of the baby's laughter before they sever the connection, and that does something to ease her sadness.

Then, all at once they are alone on a cold winter's night. Zelda stands in the clearing, arms still slightly raised.

She turns to Hilda, and in the reflected moonlight of the snow, she's once again the loveliest thing Hilda has ever set eyes upon.

"Come on love" She says holding her own arms out "Let's go home."


	4. four

To say the next week is a panic is an understatement.

Hilda is accustomed to her share of Spellman disasters, but this one revolves around her, not her niece, and she longs for her former quiet hours. She’d even volunteer to do the laundry if anyone in this house would let her alone for longer than five minutes.

First, there is Ambrose. Zelda has put him in charge of cleansing the house and music, which was pretty much putting him in charge of nothing at all, and judging by the twinkle in his eye when he quizzes her on every song she’s enjoyed in the last century, he knows it. He clinks their coffee cups together and winks at her. “Zelda finally grew a pair huh?” Is his only comment, and Hilda sprays a bit of coffee in the air, just missing him.

”What-“

”Oh come on Hilda.” He waggles his eyebrows. “She’s been eyeing you off since the Stone Age.” This is news to Hilda. “Was it very obvious?” How unobservant has she been this past century? 

Ambrose puts an arm around her. “It wasn’t. Only reason I noticed was Uncle Edward mentioned it once.”

Hilda goes cold at the mention of their brother, sanctioning this in any way. What did he feel bad that Zelda, now used goods, should get at least one of her siblings? Oh it would be so like him, her meddling, high handed brother, to interfere and puncture her happiness from fifteen years under the earth.

”He said Diana was his Hilda. I thought it was an odd comment to make at the time,” Ambrose shrugs “I spent weeks trying to work out whether he thought I had a teenage crush. And then one day I saw Auntie Z and you. You were making preserves, and you weren’t really paying that much attention to her, but she was looking at you. Got pretty easy to spot after that.”

She looks down into her cup. Edward had never said-

“Anyway, do you think _Play with Fire_ or _Sixteen Candles_ is better for the first song?”

 

***

 

Sabrina has been put in charge of decorations and food. She’s conscripted her friends into weaving thin green garlands from a group of pines at the edge of the woods. Hilda notices with relief that Roz and her niece seem to be as friendly as ever. Perhaps the whole Harvey business would leave them in peace. Although knowing her niece, Hilda brews up a small batch of soothing balm that night just in case. It never hurt any Spellman to err on the safe side where their lot and romance is concerned.

She ends up using most of it herself. It’s annoying to be shooed out of her own kitchen, and even more so when she is forbidden from entering her own parlour. Sabrina has even wrangled some time off from school. “I told them I had a religious holiday to prep for.” Is all her niece will say when she blocks Hilda’s path to a nice afternoon cup of tea.

Their niece has been teaching her mortal friends simple charms for making flowers blossom on the twigs their spend their days collecting. It’s not much more than nudging nature along with some pre-jarred charms, picked out from a litany of spells Hilda herself taught Sabrina in this very kitchen when she still had to be lifted into her chair, but it makes Hilda nervous seeing Susie Putnam blow little white blossoms to life. It feels unsafe.

She’d mention this to her sister, but Zelda is the worst of them. Ever since they returned from the meadow, baby-less and wrought out, Zelda has been in a bad mood.

A baptism is exactly the kind of thing Hilda would organise. Zelda would smoke behind her newspaper, be imperious and take all the credit in the end. But that won’t do for the first time in their long lives. 

Hilda doesn’t know what part of the festivities Zelda has allotted herself, but knowing her sister, she’s underestimated simple domestic tasks and overestimated herself. 

 

***

 

The first baby-less night was rough for her sister.

Hilda had emerged from the bathroom, feeling mildly excited for what this new night would bring, especially after the meadow, to find her sister under the covers, contemplating her toes with a sour expression.

”Zelds?” She’d attempted, feeling suddenly that perhaps the past day, the past week had all been a fever dream, and it was just back to the usual, Zelda with her stormy moods, and Hilda, forever locked outside them, trying to work out what she’d done wrong. 

“What?” Zelda ground out, and Hilda cringed, because that tone was never a good sign, perhaps she should offer to brew some tea, diffuse the situation that way-

But _no_. No. She wouldn’t use stalling tactics. If anything was to change in how they related to each other, here was the first test.

She perched, on the side of Zelda’s bed. “Move over” She ordered. And Zelda, miracle of miracles, moved. 

Hilda made her roll over, then wrapped one arm around her middle, flattening her chest to Zelda’s back, tucking her knees into the back of her sisters.

There was a moment of silence.

”You know I like to be the big spoon”

Hilda huffed, and propped herself up on one elbow. “You are the worst person I’ve ever met.”

Then she turned over. After a moment she felt Zelda shift behind her. An arm came around her middle. Hilda covered Zelda’s cold hand with her own. She felt Zelda’s breath on her ear. But there was no retort, no clever cutting remark and for the first time in years Hilda felt a bully.

”But also the best.” She hedged after another long moment.

The arm around her middle tightened, and that was all the answer she got.

 

***

 

Since then Zelda has stopped touching her. 

She sits Hilda down the next morning and explains that she’ll have to make herself _‘as pure as circumstances allow_ ’ for her upcoming baptism. They’ve set it at six days from now, a strong traditional number, and an endless chasm for Hilda.

She has to fast. Goats blood and black tea would give anyone an unsettled stomach and a less than sunny disposition.

Zelda isn’t helping matters either. She spends the day in the part of the attic not inhabited by Ambrose, and won’t tell Hilda what she’s looking for. All day Hilda operates to the soundtrack of her stomach grumbling and Zelda’s muffled curses. 

That night, she finds that Zelda has pushed their beds as far apart as the room will allow. She’s dressed in the high collared dressing gown, one she hasn’t worn since the twenties, and is fastidiously reading her worn copy of the Satanic Bible. Hilda manages to go through her bed time rituals and cold cream before slipping under the freshly made bed. Zelda even washed the undersheet. _There’s nothing even to remind her_ \- and just like that Hilda feels tears well up.

She must make a noise because Zelda finally looks at her. “If you’re near me I won’t be able to control myself.”

She reaches for Hilda’s hand across their beds. Quick as a bat she brings the back of Hilda’s hand to her lips. “Everything must be perfect” Hilda fights not to roll her eyes at that. Zelda’s breath is still warm on her hand. She turns it around and Hilda sees the briefest flash of a smile, before Zelda sinks her teeth into the flesh near her thumb. She doesn’t bite down, just worries the skin there, pressing the hot coil of her tongue into the centre of Hilda’s palm. Hilda flexes her fingers to stroke the side of her sister’s face when-

“ _Enough_ ” Zelda drops her hand and leans back against her head board, trembling and flushed. “I worked too hard for this. I won’t undo it because I can’t control myself like some hormonal teenage boy.”

Hilda wishes she wouldn’t. If she’s honest, she doesn’t much care about returning to the coven right now. Her real coven has always been here, red haired and infuriating as heaven. It just wouldn’t be wise to tell Zelda so. It would make things difficult between them. And hasn’t that always been Hilda’s role? To ease Zelda’s lot since they gained admission to this life?

 

***

 

On the second evening, Sabrina asks her which season she likes best. “Spring, poppet.” She answers,  trying not to salivate over the tofu scramble she’s frying for her niece. “You know I love my plants.”

Zelda has ensconced herself into what was Hilda’s bedroom for that depressing month, and the sound of the sewing machine has been drifting down all day. Zelda is a decent enough seamstress, but Hilda’s not known her to take this long on a project since her own baptismal dress.

”She has to eat” Hilda grumbles.

”Don’t worry, I’ll take her up a plate”

She attempts to stay awake until Zelda comes to bed, and fails. She dreams of strawberries and cream, and a pink tongue darting to smear red lipstick.

 

***

 

The third day pass much the same way, except now Hilda is no longer hungry. The fast has settled. The goats blood is still an endurance. She catches no more than the barest whiff of cigarette smoke. If Hilda didn’t know better she’d say her sister was hiding from her.

 

***

 

On the fourth day, Zelda palms a funeral off to the Riverdale mortuary and goes to town.

Hilda only knows this because Ambrose tells her. It’s so entirely unlike Zelda to turn down good paying work that Hilda is momentarily stumped. They’ve never closed the business, not even while the whole drama of Sabrina’s aborted baptism was playing out.

”Said she had to get some things” Ambrose shrugs before shoving a pair of headphones over her ears. “Does this put you in a dancing mood?” He asks, then hits play on the discman the things are connected to.

Bowie would put anyone not seriously contemplating fratricide in a dancing mood.

 

***

 

As fifth days of waiting go, hers is alright. She bakes three pies for her own party, passing them to Susie to go into the oven in the kitchen in which she is still not allowed. She reads nearly two whole books. She turns the vegetable garden over in preparation for spring. 

Finally, she cannot avoid it any longer. She opens her box of romance novels, listening for Zelda, but knowing she’s away again, and begins to pile them on the bed. At the very bottom is a book without any shocking cover, just plain embossed leather. She opens it to reveal the hollow compartment inside. There’s nothing much, a letter from Cee she still hasn’t the heart to throw out, a picture of Edward, Zelda and her as children, stiff and obviously posed in their uncomfortable frocks, and the necklace.

It was Diana’s and even though her sister in law was a lapsed Catholic at best, she had made Hilda promise to keep it until the issue of Sabrina’s soul had been resolved.

 _She made her own choice Diana_ , Hilda thinks though it seems like a wafer thin argument. _And now I have to make mine._

 

***

 

At last the day arrives.

Hilda wakes to cherry gold blurring her vision. A single finger touches her lips before Zelda’s mouth replaces it. Then she raises herself, and Hilda sees that she’s dressed and made up, just perching on the edge of the bed. She must have cast a muffling charm. The first pale hints of dawn filter through the curtains, past the low glow of their bedside lamps.

Hilda wants to smile so she frowns. “Haven’t seen hide or hair of you in days”

”I was here”

Hilda looks away. She knows she’s being silly. She knows Zelda’s self imposed chastity had a purpose. But it still hurt.

Zelda angles her face back. “When tonight is over I’m going to fuck you through the mattress”

Hilda feels her face heat “Oh none of that” She swats Zelda away “Just having a nightcap would have been nice”

”I will spend so much time with yo that you will be utterly sick of the sight of me Hildegard Spellman.”

She allows the smile at that “No. I don’t think I will.”

 

***

 

Of course she has to be sewn into the dress. Zelda raises her eyebrows and mutters something about _any couture worth its salt_. Hilda knows she has struggled with sewing in hidden zippers since they invented the damn things. Not that she would ever admit it.

The dress is lovely she has to admit. It clings to her curves like a press of admiring hands. Clever flares here and there hide the bits she worries over. It’s white like Sabrina’s dress. A direct kick in the face of custom.

She hadn’t picked Zelda to be such a rebel and is about to say so when she looks closely at the hand-sewn lace under her fingers.

”This is mother’s dress.”

She keeps her voice toneless, because she really is unsure how she feels about this.

Zelda nods. “She had it made in the old country. Father told me that one strand of hair of each of our maternal grandmothers all the way back to the Dark Ages is woven in there.” Zelda swallows, and adjusts the fabric sitting on Hilda’s shoulders. “Are you angry?”

Hilda looks in the mirror again, and sees what flickered in and out of her memories before. “No. But I do wonder how you’ll feel about fucking me in this.”

Zelda’s look darkens. “You could wear anything on earth and I’d still want you”

She clasps Hilda’s hip, pulling her back so her behind is flush against Zelda’s hip.

Her hand stays there, curved proprietarily on that bit of her flesh while the other comes to her throat. 

Its nice to let her face be tilted back by Zelda’s cool insistent hand. It’s nice to receive her kiss, all the while feeling the hand at her hip travel across her stomach like a slow moving spider and finally press, through her pretty white dress, into the front of her knickers.

Its all so damned nice, but still Hilda opens her eyes and grinds out “Zelda?”

”Hmm?” Comes the muffled reply by her ear.

”You’d only be cross with yourself later” Hilda manages, squeezing her eyes shut against the sensation of Zelda licking the shell of her ear. 

”Not very long now.” She adds before tilting her head away, which Zelda takes as an invitation to bite the skin under her jaw.

 

***

 

That is how they are late to her second baptism.

Sabrina and Ambrose are already there, both dressed in muted blacks, standing guard outside the dimly illuminated church. Sabrina stamps her slippered feet and won’t meet Hilda’s eyes. Ambrose seems to be on the verge of laughing. Hilda can hear the low murmur of voices behind the stone. She’s not that keen on parading herself in front of a coven led by Blackwood. It won’t be quite as showy of an affair as a first baptism, with the woods and the candles, and the Dark Lord probably won’t deign to attend, but even the prospect of minor bureaucracy unnerves her. 

”Please, whatever you were doing that held you up, I never ever want to know about it” Sabrina pulls a face. “And Aunt Zelda there’s lipstick on your neck”

Sabrina flounces off into the church, leaving Ambrose to shrug his shoulders at them both. “She _is_ happy for you.” He winks, then also slips inside.

Zelda offers her arm. She’s wearing black too, and an uncharacteristic subdued red lipstick. The moonlight picks out the slight sheen in her eyes. Hilda wonders if this is as close to a wedding as they’ll ever come. Zelda, welcoming her back into their church. It’s a shame she can’t take her arm.

”I think I’m supposed to walk alone Zelds” She says as gently as she can.

Her sister flushes. “Yes” She looks at Hilda. “Of course. I had forgotten.”

”Save me a good seat”

Zelda smiles tightly, looks on the verge of speaking again, then turns and pushes the door open into the church. Hilda has a brief glimpse of her congregation. The candles haven’t been changed, only the first three rows are full and Faustus’ ornate chair is blessedly empty. Zelda will be angry on her behalf she knows, but all Hilda can feel is relieved. She doesn’t want a spectacle. Just a quiet night in a place barred to her for the last few months, a quick signature, and then a party with people she actually likes at home.

She’s just about to reach forward and press the wooden door open and into this happy future, when a light breeze caresses the back of her neck. She pauses, looking at her hand, not quite touching the dark oak yet, and hopes-

The branches behind her creak. A soft rustle moves through a non-existent canopy. The wood sighs and Hilda feels the Dark Lord calling her name.

She turns back to the trees.

The walk is strange and mist covered. Hilda knows it had been a clear night when she was getting dressed, so she supposes this is their Lord just amping up the atmosphere. Waste of theatrics honestly. A whole church of drama queens if nothing else. The thoughts relax her. The Dark Lord could kill her in the next few moments. A baptism is an offering, and it has to be accepted for her to continue living in his world. _It would have been better,_ Hilda thinks, _to never attempt this_. Now she’s drawn his eye and things could go either way. 

But it is nice to walk in her pretty dress in the woods. It suits her. Makes her think of mother, as she must have once been, before the boredom and the obligations had soured her. Hilda doesn’t mind her obligations. She loves them in fact. They’re her golden strings, leading her back from this dangerous ritual.

Her lord awaits her in the form of a black goat, idly pawing at the grass near a makeshift altar of rock.

“Take it off” His voice intones. Hilda reaches for the clasp of her necklace. The one she had hidden from Zelda. The small gold cross that Diana had seen fit to gift her after their subterfuge. She’s not sorry.

”Do you repent allowing the false god into your heart” His voice isn’t coming from the goat. It’s coming from straight in her head. Hilda shivers.

”I repent” She answers, hoping her voice sounds clear and strong.

”Liar’”

For a moment she’s frightened. Then she settles on the truth. “It was never the false god that was in my heart, only my family, my Lord.”

There is a pause. The goat shivers in and out of various forms. A snake. A bird. Three faceless priests. Hilda can’t quite seem to breathe in fully. Finally the voice returns.

”Then cut out the heart of my vessel, eat it whole, and sign your name in my book”

The knife is very sharp. She doesn’t like killing animals, even if Father had trained her well, and she pities the poor animal the Dark Lord has possessed. His blood is warm on her hands. She eats the heart methodically. 

Then Hilda Spellman signs.

 

***

 

The walk back is long. Hilda wonders what festivities Zelda had planned for her. How long has she been gone? It feels like it’s been hours, but knowing their Lord it could have been minutes, or years. Nothing ever seems to go right for this family.

Zelda waits alone outside of the church. She’s still wearing her baptismal dress. It’s such a relief that Hilda begins to cry. No centuries lost to them then. Just a few moments and an awkward ceremony at the Church of Night. Some hellish fog must keep her hidden from her sister until she’s barely five meters away. She sees Zelda’s eyes widen. Sees her fall forward. Feels her clutching hands and lets herself be pulled into a tight embrace. After a long moment she is shoved away and held at an arms length. Zelda’s eyes dart all over her. Her mascara has streaked. 

“You’re covered in blood.” Her sister finally rasps.

Hilda smiles dazedly “Not mine”

”I sent the children home- I thought- _it’s been hours_ -“

”I’m okay Zelda.”

That’s when Zelda begins to cry in earnest.

 

***

 

So that’s how Hilda’s second dark baptism ends up, not with dancing under blooming spring arches to Ambrose’s adroit music taste, but to this.

Hot chocolate isn’t all that hard to whip up in a tiff. Even Zelda accepts her steaming cup gratefully. The kitchen is warm and smells vaguely like crushed pine needles. Night presses on the windows. Salem is asleep and purring on Ambrose’s lap. Hilda has cut them all a slice of pie, and dug a scoop of ice cream out of the freezer. The rest of the platters still sit around them, ready for a party that never happened.

Sabrina’s hedgehog frown is back. Even though Hilda made sure to plop three marshmallows into her mug, just the way she likes it. She’s just about to ask, when Sabrina sighs and closes her eyes, leaning her silver head on Ambrose’s shoulder.

”Why does nothing ever go according to plan in this family?” She asks, eyes still closed, oblivious to her cousins’ smirk.

Zelda bumps Hilda’s knee under the table, and intertwines their fingers. She meets Hilda’s gaze and squeezes. Hilda knows her sister spiked both their drinks with whiskey. Knows Zelda’s pushed their beds back together and cleared her day for tomorrow.

Hilda doesn’t tell Sabrina how wrong she is.


End file.
